Moving (again) http://onrails.org from Heroku to EC2

If you read this then this blog is now running Typo 5.5 on Rails 2.3.9 on EC2.

I really love the ease of deployment to heroku and the fact that they manage the whole stack. However I receive regularly emails from Heroku stating that I get a specific number of “backlog too deep errors” indicating the app is receiving more requests than it is capable of responding to, or in other words that that my blog is outgrowing their developer instance. So I have the option to increment the number of requests my application can handle, which is easy thanks to the the heroku command line: heroku dynos +1 —app onrails. So I can increase the HTTP performance by cranking up the “dynos” to 2 which would be an additional $36 a month. I still think it’s a good deal for a managed environment.

However you also saw on my last blog entry that there are other issues with running Typo on Heroku and therefore I started playing with running Rails on EC2. And I like what I see and now that Amazon has an official and secured Amazon Linux AMI, I’ll be using that. Here are a few notes on how I did set it up.

I started with the new Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI 1.0 (http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/). I take basically only a few clicks to get a server started. You can use the ec2 console (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2) to create and connect to the server, however you need to use ec2-user instead of root to connect due to the way the Amazon Linux AMI is setup.

Note Lee is right that if I continue to moving host I should create a Chef recipe for this.